Breaking into the Bitmart crypto exchange
It is a large centralized crypto exchange registered in the Cayman Islands, but with offices in the U.S., China and several other countries. In early December, its "hot" wallets were hacked, from which mainly SHIB, USDC, BNB and some other tokens were withdrawn. For three days, the exchange work was suspended, but the management promises to compensate part of the victims: the damage is estimated at $ 150-200 million, the crypto-exchange said it would return $ 150 million to the victims of the attack.
Breaking Badger DAO's DeFi-protocol
Badger DAO is a decentralized organization for finding solutions to accelerate the use of bitcoin in DeFi and other projects. By the beginning of last year, it was one of the ten largest DeFi with $1.2 billion in assets. The hack occurred in early December, resulting in the loss of a tenth of that amount - $120 million. Moreover, one user lost $50 million, and the price of the Badger token fell by half - from $28 to $14. Now Badger DAO is thinking about how to compensate users for their losses.
Squid token
In the fall, the most sensational scam project was the Squid token based on the "Game of Squid" series. This token was immediately strange: while the "game" was in progress, it could not be sold, the project website was registered to a hidden person and had very few visits, the project's White Paper was extremely brief and disappeared soon after publication. Nevertheless, due to the popularity of the series, many have decided to join the "game of survival. And it "survived" only one player - the fraudster. At the beginning of November the token price soared to $2862, but then it plummeted to $0.0007926 - 40 thousand investors were left with nothing. However, soon token got a second life, being accepted on a number of exchanges as a "meme-token. Now it is worth about $0.1, which is hardly comforting for the most "expensive" investors, but it is still one order of magnitude higher than its scam minimum. According to some estimates, $3.4 million was raised as a result of the scam.
Hacking the Poly Network platform
The hack of a cryptocurrency trading company took place in August and had unique consequences: after negotiations the hacker recovered most of the $600 million he had stolen. He gained a noble reputation as an "honest" vulnerability spotter, and it has become DeFi community practice to pay such hackers a reward of 10% of what was stolen. He himself, under the pseudonym Mr. White Hat, wrote: "I would say that finding blind spots in the Poly Network architecture is one of the best moments of my life. To be honest, I did have some selfish motives to do something cool but harmless... Then I realized that becoming a moral leader would be the coolest hack I ever did." However, not everyone believes in the hacker's noble motives: it is highly likely that the main reason for the refund was his hacking mistakes, which in theory made it possible to track him down and catch him.
DeFi project Cream Finance hacked
This lending protocol was attacked 3 times in one year: in February for $38 mln, in August for $18 mln and in September for $130 mln. In last two cases the attackers used vulnerabilities in the microloan charge mechanism. Interestingly, in the August case, the hacker returned 90% of the stolen money to the company, keeping 10% as a reward for finding the vulnerability. But all this turned out to be insignificant against the next larger theft. In November, the platform announced that all funds from the project's treasury and even from the developers' personal tokens had been returned to users. The price of the CREAM token dropped 35% on this news, and more than tripled at the time of this writing.
Finiko iramid.
The project, which became popular mainly in the Russian segment, attracted investors' funds in BTC and USDT since December 2019, promising a yield of 30% per month. In July 2021, the site banned withdrawals from accounts, and then the manager withdrew cryptocurrencies to unknown wallets through mixers and other intermediary companies. The minimum deposit was $1,000, and bonuses were given for attracting new members. Internally, there was an internal currency - digits - which was not traded on exchanges but sold at a price dictated by Finiko. In early 2021, the Central Bank of Russia noted that Finiko had signs of a pyramid scheme, and it ended up being correct. By some estimates, Finiko raised $1.5 billion in bitcoin.
Exit skim of the Thodex exchange.
This Turkish cryptocurrency exchange was founded in 2017, and by 2021 had about 400,000 active users and nearly $0.5 billion in daily trading volume. But the impressive figures did not keep the management within the bounds of honest business. In April, the exchange's founder simply took the $2 billion in funds held and left the country. Perhaps, the prohibition of Turkish Central Bank to pay in cryptocurrency from April 30 pushed him to this action, which could reduce the popularity of the service and force him to go underground. Without waiting for that, the founder took a more radical decision.
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